Wintec drives 97% customer satisfaction across multiple departments

Wintec, the Waikato Institute of Technology, is one of New Zealand’s largest institutes of technology. It has a history spanning more than 90 years of providing vocational and professional education in the Waikato region and beyond.

Supporting three main campuses of students, staff, and the community, Wintec’s IT Services (ITS) and Facilities departments had existing legacy service management tools and call logging systems in place that were both old and unsupported. The IT team wanted to look at new opportunities and products that existed in cloud-based architecture, and that integrated with its CRM and other systems. The team wanted a solution that supported their drive to empower users with social integration, that was intuitive, and enabled self-service.

Wintec initially introduced Zendesk Support into its IT and Facilities departments as incident management and customer support for service requests and service management in early 2013. The team is managed by Nichola Haira, Service Management Manager. Configuration, testing, and go-live of their Support instance was conducted and fully active within two months.

Allan Crome, a project manager, then worked with Haira to roll out Support to the Student Enrollment area. Wintec now has a single customer request database across three separate departments, and they’re able to share that information with other departments. “Our customers are a broad range of people from students to staff to the community, with requests as diverse as IT support, facilities maintenance, and course enrollment. We need to manage all of these inquiries across multiple departments, and Zendesk Support is making that easy for us,” said Crome.

The rollout of Support offered newly transparent communication for customers, greatly improving customer satisfaction by ensuring they are informed and involved throughout the process. “Creating triggers and macros is so easy and the ability to have private and public notes allows us to be completely transparent with our customers. They can see exactly what is happening with their request and remain informed and involved throughout the entire process,” said Haira.

Wintec now offers their customers all the information they need in one place, with forums and customer comments building their knowledge base. With a ‘one stop shop’ for customers, Haira realized the potential of measuring their customer support for better and easier management. They also measure top searches within the knowledge base to better prepare for likely customer inquiries and to identify issues. “We love the reporting functionality and use it every day to measure, monitor, and see how we can improve our service management,” said Haira.

Wintec’s ITS team found Support so simple to use, they required little training and support for agents. When the Student Enrollment department came on board, the ITS staff were able to offer the training themselves. “We’ve moved Wintec’s Student Enrollment from a series of personal emails to and from staff, to a managed customer support system that provides enormous customer service improvements,” said Haira.

“Zendesk Support proved itself again for subsequent scalability when we did a rollout of 37 extra agents from a non-IT department. We’re now looking to see where else we can use Support across Wintec, like the library, International department, and even Finance,” said Crome.

“We think Zendesk Support is fantastic and our department is now acting as unofficial Support advocates for other departments across the organization. We’re trying to change the way Wintec works by using Support,” concluded Haira.

“Zendesk Support is simple to configure and implement; one of the team was able to configure it over the Christmas break and the whole thing was up and running in a week.”